Palestinians in need of advanced medical care say they’re hopeful Gaza’s Rafah border with Egypt will reopen soon after Israel received remains of the last captive on Monday, a key part of the first stage of the US-backed plan to end the war.
Chelsea have not won the Premier League since Antonio Conte led them to the 2016-17 title – and facing the Italian’s Napoli side on Wednesday brings that into sharp focus.
Conte’s triumph came in the season when Pep Guardiola began his reign as Manchester City boss.
It was Conte’s first campaign in England, too, and Chelsea enjoyed a club-record 13 consecutive league wins on their way to lifting the championship with 93 points.
Their fifth Premier League crown in 13 seasons matched Manchester United’s achievement in that same period. Chelsea – or indeed United – haven’t ruled the roost since, amid an extensive turnover of players and coaches.
Nine years down the line, we reach a dramatic finale to the Champions League’s opening phase. Liam Rosenior’s Chelsea need a win against Conte’s Napoli at the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona to go directly into the last-16 stage. Their hosts – Serie A champions last season – must win to stay in the competition.
Like so many aspects of Chelsea’s recent history, you’d struggle to write this script.
Thomas Tuchel’s Champions League triumph in 2021 and two Club World Cup triumphs have been notable achievements since Conte’s departure.
But in strictly Premier League terms, the peak of Conte’s short stint at the wheel has not been repeated at Chelsea. They haven’t really come close.
Rosenior, 41, is the latest of seven head coaches, not including interim appointments, to have led Chelsea since Conte was sacked in July 2018. He has been in post for a matter of weeks.
Speaking about Conte on Tuesday in Naples, Rosenior said: “I have huge respect for him. Firstly as a player, he was a magnificent footballer. He then went on to – and still has – an incredible career as a coach.
“I think his passion as a player transmits to the passion in his teams and obviously when I was younger watching Chelsea play in the manner that they did, defensively so strong.
Getty ImagesAfter winning the Premier League, Conte fell out with the Chelsea hierarchy under then-owner Roman Abramovich – a rift that sparked his season‑long downfall.
Chelsea missed out on several key transfer targets as Romelu Lukaku went to Manchester United, Virgil van Dijk to Liverpool and Kyle Walker to Manchester City.
Instead, they signed Tiemoue Bakayoko, Alvaro Morata, Davide Zappacosta and Danny Drinkwater, with only Antonio Rudiger proving a success among the club’s five major additions.
Conte’s second season marked the beginning of Chelsea’s transition into what many have described as a ‘cup team’, as they lifted the FA Cup.
Even when Chelsea won the title in 2017, Conte described his success as a “miracle” because it involved the “same players that the season before finished 10th.”
Despite having had an ill-fated spell at rivals Tottenham since his Stamford Bridge reign, Conte will be remembered fondly by Chelsea supporters and took a positive tone when recalling his two years at Stamford Bridge.
“It was a great experience,” Conte said on the eve of the reunion with his former club.
“We’re talking about a fantastic club with a great vision, a winning mentality and the same desire to win.”
Napoli also boast three former Chelsea players in Romelu Lukaku, Kevin de Bruyne and Billy Gilmour, but all three are injured and expected to miss Wednesday’s match.
Napoli have faced Chelsea before – in a dramatic Champions League last‑16 tie in 2012.
Getty ImagesThis winter, the breakdown in relations between Enzo Maresca and Chelsea’s sporting directors and ownership felt eerily similar to the circumstances surrounding Conte’s departure.
Ultimately, Maresca’s position became untenable and he did not make it to the end of the season, with Rosenior replacing him.
In his first campaign, Maresca reduced the gap to the league leaders to 16 points, although Liverpool’s total of 84 was the lowest title‑winning tally since 2016.
However, instability has been Chelsea’s enduring problem when compared with standard‑setting clubs such as Manchester City, Liverpool and Arsenal, who have dominated the Premier League in recent years.
All three have enjoyed continuity in the dugout and boardroom, a foundation that has helped to underpin sustained success.
Chelsea had hoped to build for the long term around Tuchel, who had close working relationships with director Marina Granovskaia and technical adviser Petr Cech, but UK government sanctions led to the end of the Abramovich‑era leadership.
When Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital completed their BlueCo takeover in 2022, they emphasised their ambition to win the Premier League. But relations soon soured with Tuchel, who appeared increasingly strained under the new ownership.
Graham Potter was then appointed, with the intention of replicating the team‑building models of Liverpool under Jurgen Klopp and Arsenal under Mikel Arteta, while drawing inspiration from Brighton’s recruitment strategy.
Yet Chelsea recruited too many players during the first season under new ownership, which created a chaotic dressing room environment that Potter could not manage. The club subsequently opted for a higher‑profile manager, appointing Mauricio Pochettino in 2024, but he did not align with their vision and was followed by the younger Maresca.
There remains widespread appreciation for Maresca’s work despite his acrimonious departure over a difference in vision with the ownership.
His successor, Rosenior, was promoted from within the BlueCo structure – having been head coach at partner club Strasbourg – in an effort to minimise mid‑season disruption, work within a structure that is built to focus on developing young players, and maintain a similar style of play to his predecessor.
Conte can look at Chelsea from a distance now, fascinated by how the approach has changed.
He said: “Every coach wants to sign young players, but if young players are over £100m like [Moises] Caicedo and [Enzo] Fernandez, it’s not for all clubs, especially in Italy. They are doing very well and are doing something important for the future.”
The club he led to glory nine seasons ago sit fifth in the Premier League and are 13 points behind leaders Arsenal with 15 matches remaining.
Manchester City – still led by Guardiola – are in the hunt.
The latest Deloitte Football Money League table placed Chelsea 10th of all European clubs, behind all five of their fellow ‘big six’ Premier League rivals.
Chelsea had been above Tottenham since 2024, but revenues of £506.85m now put them behind those clubs, with Aston Villa also closing the gap.
That financial picture can in part be attributed to Tottenham having a new 60,000‑seat stadium, which has significantly boosted their matchday and commercial income.
Chelsea have also needed to play catch‑up with clubs such as Manchester City and Manchester United in securing major sponsorship deals, having fallen behind during the later Abramovich years – and they remain without a front‑of‑shirt sponsor.
Chelsea’s hectic transfer activity, both incoming and outgoing, has added further complexity.
More than £1.5bn has been spent on signings since the 2022 takeover, while over £750m has been raised through player sales. That approach has been driven partly by the desire to rebuild the squad, but also by the need to manage lower revenues that limit spending power under financial regulations through constant player trading.
Rosenior’s goals are concentrated on what he can influence.
“The aim for us long term and in the short term as well is to compete for trophies,” he said.
Liverpool head coach Arne Slot admits he’s aware of the “noise” around the club after just five wins in their last 18 Premier League matches, but refuses to define what an “acceptable” outcome to the season would look like to him.
CBS News Editor-In-Chief Bari Weiss has unveiled the network’s new plan to grow the audience amid efforts to broaden the network’s political appeal after a set of blunders.
Among the changes that were announced in an all-hands meeting on Tuesday, the network will bring on 18 new commentators akin to US cable news powerhouses, CNN, MS Now and Fox, as well as steep staffing cuts to those who don’t align with Weiss’s vision for the network, as first reported by NPR which sourced the information from a set of journalists within the network who spoke under condition of anonymity.
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In an all-hands call with staffers, the network said that it will need to expand its reach beyond typical broadcasting and lean more into podcasting, according to audio first obtained by the outlet Business Insider.
“I’m here to tell you that if we stick to that [focusing on broadcast] strategy, we’re toast,” Weiss said.
The new hires include conservative podcasters Niall Ferguson and Patrick McGee and others like physician Mark Hyman, who has close ties to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr who has been controversial for scaling back vaccines.
Weiss, who despite not having any previous television experience, was tapped in October to lead the storied news organisation after Paramount Skydance acquired the conservative opinion writer’s publication, The Free Press, for $150m amid efforts to reach a more politically diverse audience.
The hiring of Weiss was among several key moves the network made in recent months to appease the White House, including settling a lawsuit alleging that 60 Minutes doctored an interview with then–presidential hopeful Kamala Harris for $16m, and appointing Kenneth Weinstein, a former Trump administration official, as ombudsman to investigate allegations of bias.
“The honest truth is, right now, we are not producing a product that enough people want,” Weiss said in audio of the all-hands meeting, according to Business Insider.
But Weiss has been behind many of the recent decisions that led to a slump in viewership. The network’s town hall with Erika Kirk — wife of the murdered far-right provocateur Charlie Kirk, saw a 11 percent decline in viewership compared to typical viewership in the same time slot.
Weiss has also been behind several other missteps in her short tenure at the network thus far. She delayed the airing of a 60 Minutes segment about the notorious CERCOT mega prison in El Salvador. Weiss claimed that the segment, which was already set for air, needed more reporting, which correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi criticised, calling it a “political decision” in an email.
She also oversaw the relaunch of the CBS Evening News with a new host, former CBS Mornings anchor Tony Dokoupil, who has been with the network since 2016. The show has gone through five different anchor teams since he joined the network.
“We put too much weight on the analysis of academics or elites, and not enough on you,” Dokoupil said in a video promoting his new spot.
But that was not well received.
“You wouldn’t want ‘academics and elites’ who have actually studied a subject to outweigh the off-the-cuff opinions of village idiots. This is how we’re seeing the resurgence of measles, and the widespread belief in almost non-existent vote fraud, among many other great leaps backward in the Trump era,” Larry Sabado, director of the Center For Politics at University of Virginia, said in a post on X.
And that message has not won over viewers either. While CBS has been last place among broadcast evening news programmes for decades, it continues to lose its market share under Weiss. The network’s flagship news show lost more than a million viewers during its inaugural week under the new host compared to the same time the year before.
It comes as the network’s parent company continually lobs hostile takeover bids to Warner Bros Discovery, which would include another news network often in the White House’s crosshairs – CNN.
In December, Ellison visited the White House, as per media reports, and told Trump that Paramount would execute “sweeping changes” if it acquired CNN’s parent company.
A deadly cyclone hits Indonesia’s Sumatra, wiping out communities. Al Jazeera examines the scale of destruction.
In late November 2025, a powerful cyclone unleashed days of extreme rainfall across three provinces on the Indonesian island of Sumatra.
At least 1,100 people were killed, and more than 100 remain missing. Tens of thousands of houses were destroyed, and many public facilities were badly damaged. Entire villages have been wiped out by muddy floodwaters.
Al Jazeera’s Indonesia team has followed the story on the ground, hearing firsthand accounts from survivors, as emergency services fight to reach those in need. Weeks after the disaster, the struggle continues. People shelter in flimsy tents, which offer little protection from the extreme heat. Illnesses continue to spread. Survivors and political analysts alike question whether the government’s response has been efficient and coordinated enough.
We examine the online debate ignited by Pantone’s Colour of the Year, Cloud Dancer.
This episode dives into the discussion prompted by Pantone, unpacking the uneasy relationship between colour and fascism. From hardline efforts to regulate colour in public life to the ways vibrancy and maximalism reassert themselves, we explore how colour becomes a quiet form of resistance across art, fashion, film, and design.
Presenter: Stefanie Dekker